First two seasons under Enrique's reign, FC barcelona was simply, a beast.They demolished all their opponents, barring a few. And MSN emerged and became a word synonymous to glory. With them, Barcelona won 5 out of a possible 6 major trophies. Yet this season the picture is different.They are struggling every match, not playing well in their winning games too. So let's break down the reasons for this..
1.Team-game is missing
Lovely ball from sergio to iniesta-iniesta to neymar-neymar to iniesta -iniesta to messi-lovely one to one pass between messi and suarez at the edge of the box-messi drribles past one defender and fires a shot with his left foot and GOAL!!! Typical Barcelona goal.
But this season you will find it really hard to remember these classic goals.Those defence splitting one touch passes in opponent's box are badly missed this year.So it is getting tougher to score goals against well organised defence.
2.Downfall in Suarez's game
Suarez was a beast in his first two seasons. He adapted the barcelona style very quickly and filled the gap of a proper number nine in Barcelona team. He scored tons of goals. sadly, this season he is not playing at his usual level.Even though he is scoring lots of goals,his 1st touch has been poor. More importantly he is awful in one touch passing with messi and neymar. He has missed many big scoring chances this season.3.Midfielders - Quantity without Quality
Iniesta , Rakitic , Gomes , Denis , Rafinha , Turan - Six midfielders for two positions.To give all of them playtime, Enrique has fielded a different set of midfielders in every game.That is why the connection between forward and midfield and midfield and defence has not matured.4.Lack of trust on reserve players
Considering the last half of previous season,one thing is common.Enrique never uses substituion when Barca is loosing a match.Yes,Barcelona's reserve players are not as good as the playing 11, but when nothing is going right in a match, he should take risks and use available substitutions. May be a player does some magic and saves the day.Last match against Juventus(1st leg), Suarez was playing very poorly and if Enrique would have substituted him with Alcacer, he might have scored a goal.5. Set piece
Two patterns emerging this season-whenever Barcelona have won a setpiece, they converted only 5% of it into goals, yet when they concede set pieces, 50% of the time the ball ends up in the net behind Ter Stegen.
This disease has been there since the start of the season and Enrique is yet to find an antidote for this.
6. Defence
Pique, Umtiti and Mascharano - each of them are among the top defenders in the world. Yet, they are not able to put that level of expected output on the field. Barcelona defence is very leaky this season. Further scrutiny of Enrique's reign reveals, Barcelona defence is unimaginably weak compared to the other side of their own spectrum featuring MSN
With the season at it's business end, Barca can still bring some smile to us Culés. With El-classico coming up, some Madrid demolition will be amazing, yet, considering all the problems above, morale is low. Still, never say never. Visca el Barca!
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